Welcome to The Beacon Initiative!

Welcome to The Beacon Initiative.

It can be easy to look at the world and get a bit hopeless about the state of what we see. We know we should be better than we are – further along the path of truly loving our neighbors. Yet, we find our communities stuck in a world that doesn’t always reflect the values we’d like to have.

Key among those values is the idea of seeing everyone equally. Even when we want to, we too frequently resort to seeing people through a lens of what they are rather than who they are. It’s too easy to dismiss someone because they drive the wrong car, live in the wrong place, speak the wrong way or have the wrong ethnic background. We judge them as wrong before even getting to know them.

With The Beacon Initiative, our goal is to provide a vehicle for our community to learn to value and celebrate difference. We’ll do that through a number of ways but we’ll primarily be focused on events – big and small – that spark conversations. The Beacon in our name is short for “Be a conversation”, after all, and we expect those conversations to help neighbors get to know their neighbors better.

We’ll ask people to go beyond who they’ve been and to make an effort to truly get to know those around them. We think you’ll find surprising commonalities when you take the time to have those conversations.

There are no rose colored glasses about this. Change is hard and we expect some challenges. Still, we believe this is an effort worth undertaking and we hope you, the community will support us and participate as we work to create a Scotch Plains-Fanwood community that thinks the difference of every member of our community should be valued and celebrated.